Closure

I'm reading Shalom Spiegel's The Last Trial right now. It's about Jewish legends concerning the akedah, Abraham's binding and near-sacrifice of his son, Isaac, in Genesis 22.

The book has several interesting details, such as parallels to the akedah in Greek legends, in which someone is about to sacrifice his child and ends up offering an animal instead. Or Jewish explanations for why Genesis 22 states that, after the akedah, Abraham returned to his servants, without even mentioning Isaac. Or attempts to provide a rationale behind human sacrifice, which usually concerns a desire for a good harvest and protection of the community.

What stood out to me was a passage in Sekel Tob (p. 64), whose date I do not know. In rabbinic midrash (at least in one view), Isaac's age at the akedah is calculated according to the time of Sarah's death. The rationale is that Sarah died in sorrow and horror when she heard what Abraham had done. One story says that an evil demon, Samael, told Sarah about the akedah, causing her to drop dead. In Sekel Tob, Isaac's soul leaves his body during the time of the akedah, and he sees his mother in Paradise. But the soul returns.

The point of the story may be that Isaac faithfully went through with the akedah, even after learning that his mother was dead after hearing of Abraham's deed. His devotion to God was that great! I'd like to think, however, that the story is about closure. The story of Sarah dropping dead after learning about the akedah has often made me sad. Abraham lost his wife, and Isaac lost his mother, all because of a test that God gave to Abraham. Was the test worth all that, even if Abraham didn't end up killing Isaac? I'd like to think that Isaac in Paradise let his mom know he was okay, and that Sarah perhaps understood that it was all a test: that God wouldn't really make Abraham go through with the sacrifice. Maybe she understood things from God's perspective, whatever that was.

An afterlife can create potential for closure. I think of the movie, the Sixth Sense, in which the boy who sees dead people comforts his mom that her dead mother is proud of her every day. He saw his late grandmother appearing to him as a ghost.

At the same time, it's also important to make peace with people now, while they're still around.

Mentors

My Latin mass write-up and my write-up on Martin S. Jaffee's Torah in the Mouth will overlap today.

At my Latin mass, we had political priest, and he delivered a homily on Jesus' parable of the mustard seed, which was really, really small yet grew up to be a really, really big tree, one that offered shade to birds. The priest applied that to Jesus and the church, who started off small and insignificant yet eventually became widespread and well-known, offering spiritual shade and rest to anyone who wanted it.

The priest also applied the parable to looking for the good in people, however small that good may be. He gave us the example of Thomas Aquinas, who was called a "dumb ox" by many of his fellow students, and yet a mentor dared to see the good in him. As a result, St. Thomas Aquinas became one of the most renowned theologians in history. Talk about a small seed of overlooked intelligence becoming a vast body of theological insight!

How's this overlap with my reading of Jaffee? According to Jaffee, the rabbis wanted to keep the oral Torah oral because they sought to preserve it within a scholastic community. They desired for students to memorize the oral tradition so that it might change them. They also thought students should learn their oral traditions by following a teacher, who would instruct them through his knowledge and his example. Even if a teacher died, the students would be able to recite his teaching, so he'd still be present in the community in some way, shape, or form. But if the oral Torah got written down (as it eventually did), that could endanger the learning within community that keeping the oral tradition oral had fostered. Literate people outside of the scholastic community would have access to it, including (gasp!) Christians. Things didn't exactly pan out that way, for many Jews even today study written texts in communal settings. But many rabbis sought to keep the oral tradition oral because that engendered mentorship, respect for a teacher, etc.

I learn a lot from books, and that's all well and good. But it's also good to have mentors, in both academia and my spiritual life. And, although I'm as much of a loner as you can get, I'm fortunate to have people in my life who offer me guidance, from their wisdom and their example.

I Kings 3: At the Library

I'm at the downtown public library right now. Because my own computer has broken down, I'm doing my weekly quiet time and weekly quiet time write-up at the library. I realize that several of you can't make it without my weekly quiet time write-up, so I'd be selfish not to write it, right?!

In some cases this Sabbath, I used different sources from what I ordinarily use. Most Sabbaths on my computer, I consult John Gill, John MacArthur, and the Nelson's Study Bible, and I listen to Calvary Chapel sermons and sermons from a Calvinist web site. Today, however, I read commentaries, mostly scholarly ones that have a Christian, homiletical twist.

One thing I ordinarily miss out on in my weekly quiet times is the ancient Near Eastern parallels. I'd like to correct that somewhat when I return to my usual manner of doing my weekly quiet times, without adding tons of commentaries to my reading list. I may scan the Anchor Bible each Sabbath or order a cheap copy of the IVP Bible Background Commentary.

What were some of the parallels between I Kings 3 and other ancient Near Eastern writings, or literature from other cultures? In both I Kings 3 and other areas of the ancient Near East, a king humbly asks a deity for wisdom, while taking the stance of a small child. His goal is often to protect the most vulnerable members of society. Wisdom is also called "hearing" in both I Kings 3 and ancient Near Eastern literature, implying perhaps that we are wise when we listen to God and to other people. The story of someone in authority proposing to divide a child in half to see which professing mother is the true one also has parallels, which have a similar theme but aren't exactly like the story in I Kings 3. Probably the closest parallel is a story from India.

Do the parallels between I Kings 3 and other cultures mean that God was at work in non-Israelite religions? Perhaps. The view that Israel was righteous because of her religion whereas other nations were carnal and selfish is an over-simplification. At the same time, one theme that most of the commentaries harped on was the complexity of Solomon as a character: he could be carnal and selfish, but also spiritual and selfless. The commentaries treat Solomon as bad where I (and also the biblical text) tend to give him the benefit of a doubt. They present the Solomon of I Kings 1-2 as a blood-thirsty power-grabber who ruthlessly eliminated his political opponents, but, as far as I can see, Solomon tried to be merciful to his political opponents, in some cases being more merciful than his father David wanted him to be! Only when they abused his mercy did Solomon take drastic action. And Solomon had to do so, since how could he govern the nation if people were continually seeking to overthrow him? The exception to Solomon's policy of mercy would be Joab, whom Solomon put to death without hesitation. But I Kings 2 treats this as justice for Joab's shedding of innocent blood.

But the commentaries draw a contrast between the ruthless politician Solomon of I Kings 1-2 and the meek, humble, spiritual, "put his nation above himself" Solomon of I Kings 3. I agree with their view that Solomon made poor decisions even before he turned to the dark side. Last week, I talked about how Solomon in I Kings 2 had Joab killed in the holy place, showing no concern for God's laws of purity, which seek to separate the contamination of human death from the sanctuary. I said that such an attitude set the stage for Solomon's later disregard for God. So I agree with the commentaries' overall point, even though I disagree with how they support it.

I thought about the complexity of Solomon last night as I watched Mysteries of the Bible. According to the episode that I saw, Solomon put the glory of his kingdom, his building projects, and his foreign wives ahead of God and the nation of Israel, which was why most of Israel revolted against his son and seceded from the union. In I Kings, we see that Solomon made Israelites into corvee laborers and imposed heavy taxes. That contrasts with the Solomon of I Kings 3, who put his nation before himself by asking God for wisdom rather than wealth and glory, and who also heard the case of two prostitutes, who were in one of the most vulnerable and disdained groups of Israelite society.

I struggled a little with I Kings 3:1, which states that Solomon married the Pharaoh's daughter and let her stay in Jerusalem until he finished building his own house, the temple, and the walls of Jerusalem. Commentaries came down hard on Solomon for this. Some said that he was delaying the construction of the temple, or that he placed his own palace or Egyptian bride before God's house and the security of the nation. I don't sympathize much with the claim that he didn't build the temple fast enough, since, heck, he had just come into power! Give the man some time! Maybe there's something to the argument that he prioritized his palace over the temple, for I Kings 3:1 mentions the palace before the temple. And, although I Kings 6-7 discusses Solomon's construction of the temple before that of his palace, it also says that Solomon spent more years on his palace.

I think the point of I Kings 3:1 is that Solomon let Pharaoh's daughter stay in Jerusalem (the holy city) because she didn't have another place to crash. Things were pretty chaotic at that time, for Solomon hadn't yet launched his massive building projects. The following verses illustrate this point further, for they say that the Israelites and Solomon sacrificed at the high places, for there was not yet a temple in Jerusalem. When Solomon launched his building projects, he made a house for his Egyptian wife and moved her out of Jerusalem (I Kings 7:8; 9:24). Before that time, things were pretty disorganized! I Kings 3:1 may be trying to justify Solomon letting an Egyptian live in God's holy city, something that interpreters (including the Septuagint) considered scandalous.

While I Kings 11:1 criticizes Solomon marrying an Egyptian and other foreign women, for the reason that they turned him from God, Solomon actually strikes me as rather magnanimous. According to the commentaries that I read, the Pharaoh usually didn't marry his daughters off to foreigners (Amarna Letter no. 14 ln. 14), so he must have been pretty desperate to give his daughter to Solomon. Commentaries speculate that Egypt was weak in the tenth century B.C.E., so it sought an alliance with Israel, a power to its north. And Solomon helped her out as the friendly neighbor that he was! But, while it's good to help people out, there may be a need to be careful.

I also struggled some with the issue of high places. I Kings 3 goes out of its way to apologize for Solomon worshipping at the high place of Gibeon, but I Chronicles 1 says that the Tabernacle and the bronze altar were at that location. There are scholars who may argue that Chronicles is trying to make Solomon look more godly than I Kings 3 presents, but I have problems with that idea. Joshua 9:27 portrays the Gibeonites as helpers in the sanctuary, possibly implying that the sanctuary at Gibeon was considered legitimate. And II Samuel 6:27 says that David built a tent for the ark in Jerusalem, which indicates that the Tabernacle had to be elsewhere, since it wasn't covering the ark in Jerusalem. Why else would David build a tent? Would the Tabernacle have been if Gibeon? But if that were the case, then why's I Kings 3 so uncomfortable with Solomon sacrificing there ("but he still loved the LORD...")?

These are my thoughts on I Kings 3! The next two weeks, I won't be doing my weekly quiet time, since I'll be in Indiana, and I don't want to lug all my books back there. But I have a book by Mary Gordon on Jesus, and one by Tim Keller about idolatry, so I'll be doing some Sabbath spiritual write-ups. Stay tuned!

The Mishnah: Tithes from Ammon and Moab

Yesterday, I started Martin Jaffee's Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE-400 CE (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). What stood out to me was Mishnah Yadayim 4:3, which Jaffee partially quotes on page 80. So I read the passage in my trusty Danby Mishnah, along with Danby's notes.

The passage asks what tithes Israelites in Ammon and Moab must pay in the seventh year. Rabbi Tarfon says they have to pay the Poorman's Tithe, and Rabbi Eleazar b. Azariah decrees that they pay the Second Tithe. Part of the basis for their decisions is the tithe requirement for Israelites living in Egypt and Babylon, which, like Ammon and Moab, are outside of the land of Israel. According to the passage, the rule that Israelites in Egypt pay Poorman's Tithe in the seventh year is the decree of authoritative people known as the elders, whereas the prophets were responsible for the decree that Israelites in Babylon pay the Second Tithe every seventh year. The new elders voting on the policy for the Israelites in Ammon and Moab decide to go with the previous elders rather than with the prophets: they vote for them to pay the Poorman's Tithe every seventh year. When Rabbi Eliezer (different from Rabbi Eleazar b. Azariah) hears the decision, he weeps for joy, for he has a tradition going back to Moses at Mount Sinai that Israelites in Moab and Ammon should pay Poorman's Tithe every seventh year. The deliberations of the elders actually corresponded with God's revelation on Sinai! This passage is an example of what appears to be Jaffee's thesis: that rabbinic literature initially treated halakah as the work of the sages, but they tried over the years to tie it to God's revelation to Moses at Mount Sinai.

Some background information is in order. The Torah mandates two tithes (technically-speaking) for the children of Israel. The first tithe goes to the Levites (Numbers 18:20ff.): it's their due for the work that they do for God, and it also supports them because they don't have an inheritance of land on which they can grow crops or raise animals. In Deuteronomy 14:22-29, we read about the second tithe. The Israelites are to bring the tithe of their corn, wine, oil, flocks, and herds to the central sanctuary, the place that God will choose. If the central sanctuary is too far, then they can convert that stuff into money and take that instead. At the central sanctuary, they are to use the money or tithe to rejoice before God, as they eat, drink, and be merry. But they are supposed to remember the Levite, who has no inheritance. Every three years, they are to devote all of the second tithe to the poor Levite, the resident alien, the orphan, and the widow, all of whom are economically vulnerable and lack the means for self-support. They pool their tithes into a location within their local gates, and the poor come to it to be satisfied.

According to Leviticus 25:1-7, the Israelites in the Promised Land are to let the land lie fallow every seventh year: they are neither to sow nor prune their vineyard. They cannot reap, but they can still eat the increase (which I don't entirely understand), which is also for their servants and the resident alien, who lacks his own land. The land rest of the seventh year and the Jubilee (also in Leviticus 25) both make an important point: the Promised Land belongs to God, so the Israelites are to obey God's instructions regarding it.

Because the Israelites in the Promised Land do not grow anything in the seventh year, they don't pay tithes during that period of time, since ten per cent of zero is, well, zero. But what about the Israelites who live and farm (or ranch) outside of the Promised Land, in Babylon, Egypt, Ammon, or Moab? For them, the rules are different, for they have to pay some tithe. It may be the second tithe, which the Israelites from those locations would preumably bring to the central sanctuary in Israel (if they indeed made that long journey). Or it could be the Poorman's Tithe, meaning perhaps that they'd have to pay it in years 3, 6, and 7 of the seven year cycle.

I thought this was interesting because of the debates over tithing within Armstrongite and ex-Armstrongite circles. Rabbinic literature is sometimes cited in these debates. I remember reading an article in The Journal by Steven Collins (not Eric Camden from 7th Heaven) that cited the Mishnah to support his point of view, which (I think) was that Israel didn't have to pay three tithes, but only one. Some who believe that tithing is not for today have argued that it related solely to the land of Israel. And so it's interesting to see what the Mishnah actually says: it presumes that there's a second tithe (and thus a first one as well) and a "Poorman's Tithe," and it also holds that Israelites outside of the land of Israel need to tithe in some capacity.

As far as my practice goes, I don't pay a full ten percent, but I try to apply the principle of charitable giving, in some way, shape, or form.

Great Is Peace...Even When Israel Worships Idols?

For my Fishbane reading (Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking), a rabbinic passage caught my eye. It's Sif/Num Naso' (H, 46), and it reads as follows (in the English translation that Fishbane uses):

R. Eleazar son of R. Eleazar ha-Qappar says: Great is peace, for even if Israel worships idols but there is peace among them---the Omnipresent said, Satan does not harm them; as it is said, 'Ephraim is bound to idols; leave him alone' (Hos. 4:17). But when they are divided, what is said of them? 'Their heart is divided, let them now be punished' (Hos. 10:2).

In its original context, Hosea 4:17 probably means "leave them alone and let them wallow in their iniquity---so that I might punish them. They're a lost cause!" And Hosea 10:2 may mean that the hearts of the Israelites are not complete and whole, since they worship other things than the God of Israel. But Rabbi Eleazar applies these verses differently, saying that God blesses Israel when she has peace and unity, even if she worships idols.

I agree with Rabbi Eleazar that "Great is peace." There's something that disturbs me when I see strife and hatred. For example, I used to get a kick out of bashing Bill Clinton and seeing others do so, and I was expecting to have the same sort of fun once Barack Obama became President. But things didn't quite turn out that way. I actually get disturbed when Obama is called a "Communist," or when people angrily shout down our elected officials at town-hall meetings.

It's not that I think everyone should agree for the sake of peace. People are different, so they have different opinions. But it's one thing to articulate a disagreement in a respectful and articulate manner. It's another thing to be hateful.

A conservative Christian in the blogosphere has an intriguing web-name: "Truth unites...and divides." It's nice when people can gather together, get along, cooperate, and have fun, without dwelling on the things that divide them. And, in a sense, the Christian faith promotes that, for it advocates love: genuinely valuing the well-being of other people, encouraging them, not being mean or rude, etc. (I Corinthians 13). But, according to Scripture, truth also divides. Exodus 23:2 says we're not supposed to follow a multitude to do evil. Deuteronomy 33:9 praises the Levites because they did not acknowledge their own family, a reference perhaps to the scene in Exodus 32, in which the Levites slaughter their fellow Israelites for worshipping the Golden Calf. Jesus says in Luke 14:26 that those who follow him must hate members of their very own family. It's not the case that Jesus in the Gospels expects his followers to be obnoxious to their family. In many cases, a Christian's family would be the aggressors because of its opposition to the Christian faith (Matthew 10:36).

I have a hard time with how some fundamentalists apply these sorts of passages, particularly when they are stridently "zealous for the truth" without a concern for whose feelings they might hurt, or they start debates and shouting matches with those who disagree with them or live differently than they do. But I like how Brian McClaren applies the passages in A Generous Orthodoxy: there are times when the majority is just wrong, when it's engaged in an activity that hurts others or exploits them. In these situations, I can understand why a Christian may need to make waves and stand against the majority. But that's my bias.

Pleroma, Angels Ascending and Descending

For my Fishbane reading today (Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking), two points stood out to me:

1. The Babylonian Talmud Chagigah 12a presents Rab saying, "By ten things the world was created: By Wisdom, by Understanding, by Reason, by Strength, by Roar, by Might, by Righteousness, by Judgment, by Loving kindness, and by Compassion" (243). Fishbane says that, for Rab, these appear to be qualities of God's own nature, rather than things that he creates.

In a comment about a similar statement in 'Abot de-Rabbi Natan, however, Fishbane states that such qualities in the passage "are primordial entitities brought into being by God (as is Wisdom, according to Prov. 8:22), or are some other embodiments of divine attributes that 'serve' God as agents of His cosmic command" (246).

This reminds me of a post I did a while back, Tertullian the (Semi-)Arian? For the church father Tertullian, the Word who became Jesus Christ was the Logos Prophorikos. What's that mean? For Tertullian, God the Father had wisdom inside of him, and that wisdom is called the Logos Endiathekos. But, when God decided to create the cosmos, he emitted that wisdom so that it became a person, the Logos Prophorikos, who later was incarnated as Jesus Christ. In a sense, Jesus is the expression of God's wisdom. God produced a person who had his wisdom to be his agent, who would create the heavens and the earth.

And that appears to be some of the issue in these rabbinic texts. God has all of these good attributes inside of him, but did he create separate beings who embodied particular attributes and mediated them to creation? Is there an angel of justice, and an angel of mercy, etc.? We know from Exodus 12 that there is a death angel, a Mashchit. For many scholars, ha-Satan was a prosecuting attorney, someone who encouraged God to act according to strict justice. Is the rabbinic idea of different entities in a plenorama biblical?

In ancient thought, the Pleroma was a realm of various deities or supernatural beings. What's interesting is that Colossians 2:9 uses that word for Jesus Christ, saying that in him dwells all the Pleroma of the Godhead bodily. The passage may very well mean that there weren't a bunch of sub-deities (or, for certain Jewish thinkers, angels) in a Pleroma whom people had to appease. Rather, there's Jesus Christ.

That brings me to something else that Fishbane says. In commenting on Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer 3, Fishbane states: "The world is thus not the haphazard result of diverse divine attributes (like justice and mercy), but rather the product of reason and deliberation" (243). Many evangelicals define justice as strict punishment, as in burning in hell for all eternity, which people deserve if they aren't covered by the blood of Christ. For them, God punishes people in eternal hell if they aren't morally perfect, and that's God's justice. Mercy, however, is forgiveness. Rabbinic literature assumes this sort of polarity, for there's a passage that says that God did not create the world in strict justice or strict mercy. If there were strict justice, then nobody would be alive, since we're all sinners. If there were strict mercy, then the evildoers would be let off, and evil would be rampant.

But could justice be something other than God sentencing people to eternal hell for their imperfection? In her post, Just to forgive, Jamie Kiley refers to I John 1:9, which affirms that God is just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us of all unrighteousness. So is justice necessarily the polar opposite of forgiveness? Maybe it's God's righteousness, which is made evident both when he punishes and also when he forgives. And perhaps God does not have a split-personality with two conflicting attributes of justice and mercy (see my post, Does God Have a Split-Personality?), for the two are integrated with each other in some sense. Just a thought!

2. On pages 247-249, Fishbane discusses rabbinic passages about God ascending upon Abraham and Jacob. He brings in peculiar ideas that occur in rabbinic literature, such as the one that there's a heavenly form of Jacob engraved on the Chariot that God rides, and that, in Genesis 33:20, God actually calls Jacob God on earth (Babylonian Talmud Megilliah 18a; also, Genesis Rabbah 47:6; 69:3; 82:13).

I thought about John 1:51, where Jesus tells one of his disciples that he will see angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man. Within the history of biblical interpretation, people have read John 1:51 in light of the story of Jacob's ladder in Genesis 28. There, Jacob is on the run from his brother, Esau, and he sees a ladder that leads to heaven, with angels ascending and descending on it.

I found Raymond Brown's comments in the Anchor Bible for John to be quite interesting. Brown states that some have interpreted John 1:51 in light of the passages that Fishbane discusses---the ones about God ascending on Jacob:

In the Midrash Rabbah LXVIII 12 on Genesis xxvii 12, we find that Jacob's true appearance is in heaven while his body lies on the earth, and the angels are traveling back and forth between them. Applying this to John, some suggest that Jesus is really with the Father as Son of Man, and yet he is on earth at the same time; the angels constitute the communication between the heavenly and earthly Jesus...It should be pointed out that the rabbinic source for the theory is no earlier than the third century A.D., although the interpretation of Genesis may be earlier. (90)

A heavenly Jesus and an earthly Jesus existing at the same time? That reminds me somewhat of a conversation I had with Polycarp, whom (if I'm correct) was saying that God was in heaven yet manifesting himself on earth, while being the same person. Polycarp can correct me if I'm misrepresenting him. But the idea also reminds me of something I encountered in the Shepherd of Hermas, an early Christian document from the first-second centuries C.E., if I was interpreting it correctly. See my post, The Shepherd of Hermas' Christology.

Brown discusses other ideas, though, such as the one that Jesus in John 1:51 was referring to himself as the ladder between heaven and earth. Others have asserted that Jesus is the new altar, since Jacob built the altar of Bethel in Genesis 28. The idea of a heavenly Jesus and an earthly Jesus, however, is intriguing to me, even though it looks strange and has a "heresy" feel to it! But perhaps one can still understand John 1:51 in light of certain rabbinic passages: Jacob was God on earth as God's representative (cp. Exodus 7:1), and so was Jesus (though many would argue he was much more than that).

God's Home

For my Fishbane reading (in Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking), what stood out to me was the issue of God's location, or, more accurately, the location of his divine glory (Shekinah).

In my post yesterday (A Comforting Presence), I touched a little on the biblical and rabbinic notion that God goes with Israel into exile. There was an earlier rabbinic view, however, that stated that God's presence was perpetually in Jerusalem. That's why Psalm 68:7 says that God brings the solitary ones home, Lamentations Rabbah Petichta 29 argues: God was not with Israel in exile, but he stayed behind in Jerusalem, his resting place. And the rabbis could cite Scriptural passages that supported this position. In Ezra 1:3, for example, the Persian king Cyrus affirms that the LORD is in Jerusalem at that time, even though the Jews are in exile and the temple is in ruins.

I encountered this view here at Hebrew Union College. A professor of mine said there was an ancient view that a God of a country was in some sense confined to his particular country. That's why God in Genesis 12 told Abraham to go to Canaan: that's where God was.

I can think of passages that lean somewhat in that direction. In I Samuel 26:19, David tells Saul that he has driven him out from abiding in the inheritance of the LORD (the land of Israel), telling David in essence to serve other gods. The implication here seems to be that the worship of God is in Israel, God's location, so Saul driving David from that location pushes him away from the true God.

In II Kings 17:24-28, after the Assyrians had conquered Northern Israel, they bring in foreigners to inhabit the land. The foreigners did not fear the LORD, so God sent lions among them. The Assyrians then realize that the foreigners know not the manner of the God of the land, so they get Israelite priests of Bethel to teach it to them. This passage is interesting for the purpose of this post, for it shows that God is attached to the land of Israel, even when his people are not. It's also interesting because it doesn't seem to coincide with other themes of the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua-II Kings), notwithstanding the Deuteronomistic elements of II Kings 17. The Deuteronomists desired to limit worship to Jerusalem, but here, there is some sense that the worship of Northern Israel could be legitimate, even though it wasn't in Jerusalem.

One narrative I've often heard is that the Jewish religion survived whereas other ancient Near Eastern religions did not because the Jewish religion found a way to exist in exile, away from the land of Israel and its temple. Other ancient Near Eastern religions, by contrast, were limited to their lands, so they did not survive. But the Jewish religion said God was everywhere and could be worshipped in any location, even in exile.

This may be true in a big-picture sense, but there are counter-examples. One that Fishbane cites is from the Marduk Prophecy, dated to 1124-1103 B.C.E., in which "we read of three self-determined exiles which the God Marduk underwent (to Hatti, Assyria, and Elam)---leaving Babylon in distress and benefiting the new lands of residence" (144). So other ancient Near Eastern religions believed that their god could survive in exile. And, although there was a notion that the defeat of a nation proved that its god wasn't all that powerful, there was also a view that a god could punish his nation for its sins, so its defeat did not prove his lack of power. Marduk showed that when he benefitted his new lands of residence!

Something else that Fishbane discusses is a rabbinic view that Israel's exile actually casts doubt on God's power (154-155). Granted, God goes with his people into exile, and that's all well and good. But God displays his power when he delivers Israel from her enemies and guarantees her presence in the Promised Land. The relevance of this point to my post here is that God is most at home in Israel, even though he may travel into other countries to be in Israel. But there's another profound message here: According to this view, God at some point has to cease being a wanderer to deserve Israel's worship and the admiration of the nations. This overlaps with my post yesterday, which said that God being with us in our suffering doesn't really solve the theodicy problem. At some point, we need a basis to trust in God's power and love, some hope that things can and will get better and that God will deliver us from our miserable cycles.